The present invention relates to mechanisms for scheduling broadcast information, and more particularly, to mechanisms for maintaining variety and/or timeliness of the information in a scheduled broadcast stream.
Information systems allow a wide variety of information to be transmitted to individual consumers of information. A typical information system includes an information transmitter and one or more information receiver systems. The information receiver systems receive the information transmitted by the information transmitter, and provide the information to the consumer. Such an information system may be based on over-the-air transmissions, satellite transmissions, wire-based transmissions including cable, fiber-optic transmissions, or any other type of information transmission medium.
For most systems, there is a large amount of information that is available for broadcast. The information may take the form of news stories, entertainment programming, software, etc. Each of these general categories of information often have multiple sub-categories. For example, news stories may have local, national and international sub-categories, each covering a wide variety of topical categories such as sports, business, recreation, etc. Each topical category may have further sub-categories. For example, the sports topical category may have sub-categories of baseball, football, soccer, hockey, etc. As can be seen, there can be a wide variety of information that is available for broadcast.
Compounding the amount of information that is available for broadcast is the element of time. New information is always becoming available. Thus, the mere passage of time tends to multiply the amount of information that is available for broadcast. Some information may be more relevant if it is timely and fresh. For example, the score a hockey game may be much more relevant just after the game than it is even a few days later.
Because information systems have a limited bandwidth, all of the available information cannot be broadcast. Thus, some selection must be made with regard to the available information. For conventional broadcast mediums, such as television, this selection is typically done by an editorial staff or the like, which identifies and selects what it believes to be timely information that covers a variety of topics of interest to its viewers. A limitation of such an approach is that a human editorial staff can be expensive to maintain. Further, the editorial staff may not be able to operate in real time, and may become easily overloaded, particularly when information from a variety of sources covering a wide variety of topics must be constantly considered for broadcast. Thus, the editorial staff may miss or delay important information that is highly relevant to the consumers of the information. What would be desirable, therefore, is a more automated approach for identifying and scheduling information for broadcast.